The Challenges of Building a Web3 Community from Scratch With Strategies for Success

A project starts once the founder, technology, product manager, and community operations are together. Building and operating a community from scratch is undoubtedly the biggest challenge for the community manager in a project's initial stage.

Internal and External Challenges When Building Community from Scratch

In the initial stage, community managers often face internal and external challenges.

Internal Challenges

Resource limits

A project in the initial stage may need more human, time, and financial resources to support community building, which means that the community manager has to invest a lot of work to deal with limited resources.

Lack of experience and community management mechanism

When building a community from scratch, community managers must test different community management strategies to find the one that works best for the project. However, this trial-and-error process often comes with higher risks and costs. Considering the limited team resources, community managers must be careful about taking the risk of trial and error and not try too much.

External Challenges

Difficulty in acquiring customers

High product usage thresholds and poor user experience are hurdles that Web3 projects face when acquiring customers. Compared with Web2’s multi-channel customer acquisition strategy, Web3’s customer acquisition strategy is more complicated. Moreover, new projects emerge in a bull market, and users have multiple choices. For users who have already participated in Web3, many competing products are in the market for projects.

Low awareness and weak community culture

The entire market is highly profit-driven, and users are more concerned about how to make profits rather than the project's intrinsic value. Therefore, users' awareness of the project could be increased. To attract users, overemphasizing Token Generation Events (TGE) may lead to low user loyalty and is not conducive to developing a mature community.

How to overcome external challenges?

Customer acquisition in the community

The first thing to do is to acquire customers when building a community. A community is where there are people. There are three questions that community managers can consider to find the best way to acquire customers in the community:

Who: Clarify the target users of the community

Business in Web3 can be roughly divided into trading and non-trading categories, with users having significant differences in their behaviors and habits.

Trading users mainly focus on market fluctuations and investment opportunities, pursue maximizing returns, are extremely sensitive to the security and liquidity of trading platforms, tend to use professional trading tools and platforms and pay attention to the project's technical strength and team background.

Non-trading users are more interested in applying digital assets in real-life and innovative fields, focus on community building, product functions, and user experience, and are willing to contribute time and resources to projects with social impact and innovation.

After clarifying the target users, the community manager can create appropriate customer acquisition hooks based on the characteristics of different user groups and combine them with product attributes.

What: The hook to acquire customers

For trading users, TGE is one of the fastest ways to attract users, but relying solely on TGE is not conducive to the long-term and healthy development of the community because this type of user has low loyalty. In addition to TGE, the project can promote the product based on the professionalism, safety, solutions, and technical strength of the project.

Non-trading users are more pragmatic and pay more attention to connections between people. Therefore, the community manager can resonate emotionally with such groups, making them think this project and this community can deepen their sense of identity in the virtual world.

Community managers need to consider choosing appropriate hooks carefully. Inappropriate hooks may create unrealistic expectations before users join the community, leading to backlash effects.

Where: Channel

In addition to traditional channels such as social platforms and media advertising, many projects choose KOL as an essential channel. At present, growth platforms have become the choice of more and more projects. For example, 1inch has launched growth campaigns on various growth platforms since 2023:

Why are more and more community managers choosing growth platforms?

1. Growth platforms usually have powerful user data analysis capabilities, which can help communities accurately locate target user groups. Platforms can display marketing activities to interested users, improving customer acquisition efficiency.

   
   

2. Reduce the cost of user education. Users acquired by the growth platform will have basic knowledge, and this will reduce the workload of community managers.

   
   

3. Growth platforms usually have growth drivers and achieve growth goals by attracting more users. Therefore, working with a growth platform can fully use its growth momentum to help the community expand rapidly.

   
   

4. Compared with traditional marketing channels, choosing a growth platform to acquire customers can reduce user acquisition costs. Because the growth platform has a vast user base and traffic, the community can invest little additional money in advertising or marketing activities.

   
   

With a limited budget, community managers must choose channels carefully to maximize the use of limited resources. Community managers must evaluate the costs of paid advertising, KOL, or growth platforms. There are many growth platform options on the market. Community managers need to fully understand the fees and effects of each growth platform and pay attention to the changes and trends of the growth platform to ensure the maximized customer acquisition effect.

User conversion

Maximizing customer flow is achieved by combining a clear user portrait, precise hook, and channels, and then the community can grow. However, community managers must realize that simply joining and quickly exiting a community cannot be regarded as real community growth. Community managers must convert the traffic the channel attracts into actual community members.

Community Content

Enriching community content is critical to increasing user awareness. The community's content plays a vital role in determining members' first impressions of the community, allowing members to understand the community's discussion topics and what to expect, and subtly adjusting the mentality of new community users.

Considering that new users may have a highly profit-seeking mentality, the community's content should be attractive and educational, helping users understand the core values of the community and promoting interaction and communication among members. Regarding content, community managers can start from two aspects: educational content and interactive content.\

Educational content: convey valuable information and knowledge

In community building, educational content is crucial. Suppose new community members need help obtaining the necessary information and finding the project's positioning in time. In that case, they will likely lose interest and turn to other projects quickly. To this end, community managers should deliver valuable information and knowledge to new members by publishing particular articles and guides, organizing AMA activities, etc., to help them better understand the core concepts and values of the project.

In addition, the help manual is also essential. A good help manual can reduce a lot of repetitive work. The help manual helps members understand the project's positioning and is the first guidance material that members come into contact with when they begin to experience the product. For example, eth provides developers and everyone with a complete and step-by-step eth operation document:

Interactive content: Encourage user interaction with products

Community interaction includes interaction among members and interaction between members and products. For community managers, promoting the interaction between members and products and transforming community members into product users are the core goals of community operations.  To this end, community managers can design enjoyable but straightforward tasks and games to cultivate users' habits of using the product. Some community managers set up a Q&A on a third-party community platform and put the information the project wants to convey to users into each question. While exploring answers, users unconsciously build up an initial impression of the project.

TaskOn supports the construction of systematic QA sets, offering diverse formats such as simple questions or multiple-choice options. The survey mode facilitates the rapid collection of user feedback for projects.

The interactive content extends beyond just Q&A. In communities such as DeFi and GameFi, there's a desire to encourage users to gain a deeper understanding of the products through active usage. These communities utilize TaskOn's rich selection of on-chain task templates to guide users step by step through experiencing the functionalities of their products.

Loyalty Program: Establish level system

With the establishment of community customer acquisition channels and the completion of user education content, community managers need to devote their energy to establishing a user loyalty system to cultivate a core community of users. Community managers of many projects convert users' contributions into staged achievements, which users can exchange for various benefits, thus deepening the connection between users and the project.

In the early stages of a project, when time and resources are limited, community managers can leverage tools to initiate the establishment of a loyalty program. There are numerous community solutions platforms available in the market that can assist community managers in swiftly setting up loyalty systems, starting with the creation of a points system. TaskOn can help you.

By rewarding users with points for their current actions, users accumulate points that can be redeemed for certain privileges in the future, creating anticipation and motivation among users.

Internal Challenges

The shortage of team resources and people will continue for a long time, considering the development of Web3. What the community manager can do is use various means and resources within limited time and resources, use the Who, What, and Where mentioned above to find the customer acquisition formula suitable for the community quickly, use tools to improve the community management experience, reduce the cost of trial and error, and improve the efficiency and quality of community construction.